As a marketer, I am fond of analytics. When it comes to the web, though, one thing I realize is that it is easy to have way too many of them and not really know which to focus on. Some of the most tantalizing metrics, for example, like number of impressions don't usually tell you as much as something more obscure, such as how long someone spent on your site and your top "exit page" - that is, the page that someone looked at last before leaving your site. Among those hidden metrics are the amount of people who visit your site and end up quite rapidly on your About Us page.

 

This is the page that introduces your company and in my experience also tends to be one of the most neglected pages on company websites. It is easy to think that this wouldn't really matter much, but when you look at your analytics and page visits, you will probably be surprised to discover just how many people end up on that page. Actually, if you paid attention to your own web browsing, you wouldn't be that surprised at all. See, we all want to know who we are dealing with. We seek to know and understand the backstory of a company, as I have often called it. The backstory matters, and it is not just your analytics or number of visits to your About Us page that prove that.

 

There are many ways to improve the backstory of your organization, but the one I will focus on today is how to reinvent your About Us page to be a better introduction to your company. The following are three tips on how you can make that page really do its job and sell the promise of your company and why a customer might want to work with you:

 

1. Create better and more human writing. Marketing writing is easy. All you have to do is use lots of words that seem like they feel "professional" and talk about your products or services in the abstract sense. The problem with that kind of writing is that it is too detached. No one responds to marketing writing. The writing they do respond to, though, is the kind of writing you watch on TV or in the movies. Screenwriting. So to make your About Us page better, you need to think like a screenwriter. This means that you write in a style of something you might actually say out loud. The best marketing writing is written to be said, not to be read. So give it a try, and then use the simple test of reading it out loud. If it sounds strange or unnatural, change it.
2. Use video to share your personality. Once you improve the writing on your about page, you might realize that it could be even more powerful to share an introduction to your company over a video. This could be a video of the founder, or a series of interviews with employees or even with your customers. Don't worry if the thought of online video seems to complicated to do yourself ... there are a host of companies like www.turnhere.com who can help you create a video to sell your business for a very reasonable price.
3. Leverage slide presentations you already have. If a video seems out of reach for budget or other reasons, you might also try to create a slide presentation to sell your business. Depending on the type of business you do, this might even be something that you already have in Powerpoint that you use when you make sales calls in person. By using a site like Slideshare, you can now upload that presentation and embed it into your homepage with just a bit of cutting and pasting. The benefit is that you can tell your story in a more visual and logical way, and perhaps even open the door to sales without all the effort. With Slideshare's new lead generation feature, you can even measure the leads that your slideshow brings into your business.

 

Finally, for an example of a great About Us page, check out this page from Poken.

NOTE: This post is part of Small Business Friday (SBF) - a weekly feature on this blog to share marketing ideas for small businesses and was originally published on the Amex Open Forum site.

Every morning I do something which you will probably find surprising for a marketer: I unsubscribe to emails. More than that, I actively block senders of unwanted emails and routinely delete undesired emails before I even start reading those that I do. You might wonder why it is that I get so much email I don't want in the first place ... and the main reason is that I still actively sign up to try new sites and get new marketing offers by email. Most times it is marketing curiosity rather than an actual desire to get an email which leads me to sign up for something - which means I may be doomed to repeat this morning ritual for a long time to come.

Every morning I do something which you will probably find surprising for a marketer: I unsubscribe to emails. More than that, I actively block senders of unwanted emails and routinely delete undesired emails before I even start reading those that I do. You might wonder why it is that I get so much email I don't want in the first place ... and the main reason is that I still actively sign up to try new sites and get new marketing offers by email. Most times it is marketing curiosity rather than an actual desire to get an email which leads me to sign up for something - which means I may be doomed to repeat this morning ritual for a long time to come.

As marketers slowly turn to using social media as a greater part of their marketing, it is easy to think that the importance of email will start to fade. I believe it won't. In fact, I think that social media in many ways is making email even more important because it is the glue that holds much of our personal interactions through multiple sites together. I have set up my email so that I only receive notifications and direct emails for the types of interactions most important to me. In a world where each of us is surrounded by ambient media, email is still the most direct form media (along with text messages).

Here are three reasons why I think the inbox is still the golden choice for not just interacting with people, but also vital to supporting the growing landscape of social media.

1. Email represents a private "home base." On most social networks there are two choices for your profile - you can make it private or public. Email is the one place where you can have both simultaneously, a public email that you can share with people, while still keeping your identity and private details mostly hidden.
2. Notifications & alerts rise above the noise through email. If you use Twitter or Facebook or any other site, you can choose to get an alert sent to your email inbox when you receive a new message. For news topics (or self-Googling) you can set up a Google Alert to send you an email whenever your chosen topic is mentioned online. Together these types of emails successfully manage to cut through the clutter of online conversations and provide a direct path for you to get to the information you really want.
3. It allows you to build a virtual archive of activity. Need to see an old interaction with someone or a product you ordered several months ago? Using email as a way to save all of your activities can be highly useful if you happen to need it at some point in the future. Even more importantly, most people have been using email for this purpose long before they signed up for relatively new services like Twitter or FourSquare.
4. Use email to control content creation and posting. Services like Posterous use email as the central hub for posting content as well, something that is increasingly being used as an easy way to get content posted online. You simply write your content (such as a blog post) into an email and send it to a specific address for it to be automatically posted. This post was written and posted using Posterous for example.

There are likely other reasons why email will continue to be important - but as you build your next marketing campaign, one question you should ask yourself is how your target audience will relate to your message by email. For a base of consumers getting increasing better at ignoring you in all other channels, email may need to be your best tactic.

NOTE: This post was originally published on the AMEX Open Forum website, where I write a weekly piece on marketing advice for small business owners.

Whether you believe in karma or not, using social media successfully for your small business often has a lot to do with a series of seemingly disconnected events.  Every comment you post online, every person you contact and every piece of content you upload adds to the sum total of your efforts in the blogosphere.  Building relationships is important in any industry, but social media karma is the idea that what you do and how you behave will ultimately have an effect on you directly or indirectly. 

Social media karma is not often written about, but very often spoken about by bloggers, especially successful ones.  Here are 10 ways you can improve your social media karma:  

1. Be real.  This is the first and foremost principle of furthering your social media karma that I could think of.  Being real involves not lying, being transparent about who you are and what you believe, and sharing an honest voice.  People trust others that have an authentic voice, and are more likely to refer them to others or help when asked. 
2. Respond to emails. This is tough when you have a high volume of unsolicited emails, but the idea that someone took time to write directly to you should make it enough of a priority to respond.  Obviously, this applies to personally written messages, and not to email blasts of press releases.  Those are rarely worth a response.
3. Offer exclusives.  Maybe you aren't breaking "news" online, but the idea of exclusives is not limited to that.  If you are going to write about or post something interesting, whether related to your business or not, offer a preview to others in your network.  Share ideas as they happen and offer the chance for others to say it first.  Exclusives are gold in the blogosphere ... everyone wants them.
4. Make connections. In social settings, the gold standard for making connections is introducing two people to one another who later get married.  Social media is no different.  If you can be the person making these connections between individuals that may not have met otherwise, you will be remembered by both for your efforts.
5. Join networks.  This is not just about publishing networks, but about social networks of people who are interested in the same things you are.  Joining groups like this, and actively participating adds value to the group.  As a member, it probably won't be long before you take something useful from the group – and hopefully add something useful as well.
6. Avoid snark. Snarkiness is the enemy of good karma.  Being rude, uselessly opinionated or arrogant are all rising behaviours from people in social media that add to the sea of needless commentary online.  The price for this may not be apparent, as unfortunately, snarkiness does sometimes result in conversation sometimes (who can't avoid watching a car crash?) -- but eventually the snark will catch up to you.
7. Forgive mistakes. Most bloggers or others in social media are not journalists and don't have the time or necessity for checking every fact or argument before making it.  This does result in mistakes, and people do screw up.  Correcting them without holding a grudge is a big deal.  Mistakes are made, people are sorry.  If they fixed the error, then get over it.
8. Post to contact. Email is not the only way to get in touch with someone.  Posting about something they have written and linking to their blog offers an indirect route to contact, as most bloggers pay attention to who is linking to them.  Writing about one of my posts is still the best way to get onto my radar, and I suspect most bloggers are the same way.  Communicating in this way avoids the email filter and starts the dialogue.
9. Comment and participate.  This may be part of earlier suggestions, however the idea that you need to be a participant online rather than just an observer is key to this belief.  If you expect others to communicate and add comments to your blog, you need to be online doing the same for others.  Without participation, it is difficult to belong to a community online or build relationships with others.
10. Show gratitude. Often mentioned as an important factor in connecting with users, showing gratitude for someone interacting with some content you have posted or a comment you have shared, linking to you, or offering some other effort on your behalf is vital.  Appreciation makes someone more likely to believe that you think their efforts are significant and as a result, connect more strongly with you and your blog.

Social media is not a robot. In fact, there could hardly be a more opposing idea to social media than that of robotic automation. I start this post by sharing that because the idea that any job could be "replaced" by social media is contentious idea. There are plenty of market forces displacing people from jobs ... do we really need to add social media to the list? Actually, the truth is that social media is already supplanting many jobs. Marketers, politicians, government officials, athletes and librarians are all using social media to varying levels to add context to what they do every day. Social media is a part of their new roles and will continue to be moving forward.

There are a smaller number of jobs, however, that I believe will very shortly REQUIRE SOCIAL MEDIA in order to be done effectively. These are not jobs where logging in online can help to add dimension or offer a useful outlet. In this category of social media enabled jobs, the people doing those jobs who are NOT using social media will find themselves falling behind. Here are a few of these types of jobs that come to mind for me:

1. Customer Service Representative: It is already a part of many customer service groups to allow people to interact with a company by email. More and more, social networks and social media tools are offering a chance for companies to offer proactive customer service. In some cases, like Comcast, there is an entire channel of customer service professionals who are responding to customers. In others, a company may be using a social media community through a service such as Get Satisfaction to offer this type of service. People are talking about their experiences online, and increasingly they will expect companies to be listening to them there. We are at the beginning of a large trend that in the next few years may become as ordinary and expected as being able to call a phone number to receive customer service.

2. Concierge. The sad fact of many hotels (even 5 star properties) is that the individuals they have sitting behind the concierge desk are little more than glorified order takers and bellman (or women). Think I'm being unfair? Unfortunately, my consistent travel schedule (more than 100 days a year) has led me to the truth that a good concierge who actually is an expert at knowing their own city and how to get just about anything done is few and far between. There are, of course, those concierges still available on occasion and nothing can replace their expertise. But for 95% of hotels in America (and perhaps even that percentage is too low), social media can offer the one thing that those concierges alone cannot. Through social media, you can have instant access to real restaurant reviews, shopping recommendations, direct connections with small businesses and more. All the things that a great concierge would spend years learning are now available through social media to the savvy web user.

Any other jobs come to mind that should make this list?

If you are not Indian, chances are when I say Chacha you will think of a type of latin dance. Although it is technically called the "cha-cha-cha" it's the more widespread meaning. If you WERE Indian, however, you would know that Chacha means Uncle. Actually, it means a lot more than Uncle. When I call someone Chacha, anyone who heard me would know not only that that person was my Uncle, but that my relation to him was on my father's side, and that he was younger than my father. All that information is transferred in a single word. Tau or Tauji is similar, but used as the word for what to call the same Uncle if he is older than my father.  Similar names exist on the mother's side and for the older generation of grandparents. Even siblings use the words "bhaiyya" (for older brother) and "didi" (for older sister).

Sound like a foreign and confusing system? Consider that the next time you walk into a Starbucks and order a Grande instead of a medium or a Venti instead of a small. Starbucks is one retail outlet that has their own lingo. Sit down at any Waffle House in a Southern US state and you can order your hash browns "scattered, smothered, and covered." If you've been there, you'll know what that means. 

The point is, there is a power in creating your own language that relates deeply to having your own culture. Countries and cultures have their own words that exist as a part their cultural identity. They signify a shared knowledge and basis for communication. Starbucks, on a smaller scale, has created the same thing.  What types of words does your company use that are unique to it? More importantly, are those used as a part of your company's culture internally or are they used to share an insider's language with your customers as well? Only brands with loyal and passionate customers come close to having their own language. What are you doing to create yours?